'We Love You' looks over the Rainbows

JONATHAN KALAFERThe pro-peace, pro-environment hippie types that go to Rainbow Gatherings, known as Rainbows, are featured in “We Love You,” the latest film by New Jersey Pictures.

Every summer, thousands of free spirits clad in tie-dye, beads and scarves leave the structure of real life behind to commune in a forest.

"We Love You," a short documentary screening Sunday at the New Jersey Film Festival, is an unusually intimate look at the joyful meet-ups of pro-peace, pro-environment hippie types known as Rainbows, and the latest film from Steve Kalafer’s New Jersey Pictures. Kalafer, the auto magnate, owner of the Somerset Patriots and three-time Academy Award nominee, produced the film; his son Jonathan, 34, directed.

The just-under-40-minute film "won best documentary" this summer at the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival. It was filmed last year, at a Rainbow Gathering in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest, over a week and a half, and marks the first time the father and son have teamed up as producer and director. They worked together as producers on "The Diary of Immaculée" (2006), a film with much darker subject matter: the ordeal of a young survivor of the Rwandan genocide.

"Part of the story for me in choosing this topic was that I wanted something that was light and positive, because I had just finished producing the last documentary," says the younger Kalafer, a clean-cut Mendham resident who teaches digital music and video production at Jersey City’s Dickinson High School.

Light and positive he got. The Rainbow Gathering he shows looks a little like summer camp for adults — though the food is good and abundant, provided through impressive temporary kitchens, and the main event is a massive peace prayer on July 4. The emphasis on peace, love and nature, plus a riot of flowing skirts, long hair and tie-dye, channels Woodstock.

While music is not the focus of the gathering, as it was at Woodstock, people do get together to perform and revel in it. "We Love You" opens with a man with long brown hair and a scraggly beard singing and playing guitar to an audience around a bonfire, a mellow song about living in harmony with people and nature. Everyone there is family — the loosely affiliated group is known as the Rainbow Family or Tribe — and "we love you" is repeated again and again.

"With Ang Lee’s film ("Taking Woodstock"), I think people are looking back at that again," says Jonathan Kalafer. "It’s an interesting part of American history, and I think people could gain a lot from looking back."

He first heard about Rainbow Gatherings while an undergraduate at Rutgers, where the film will make its East Coast debut. When he learned Pennsylvania would host a gathering, he decided to go.

"To my surprise, it was exactly like they had described it, this temporary city in the forest where people are interacting with each other in ways that are totally different from the ways people interact in New York," he says. "I couldn’t believe it."

The mini-city is built largely with materials available on-site; attendees create mud ovens for cooking and baking and lay water lines to distribute spring water. People are meticulous about cleaning up, says Kalafer, separating materials for recycling, scouring the ground for trash and spreading seeds to refresh the landscape.

The Rainbow Family has no formal leader or structure, partly because it began during the Vietnam War era. The first gathering took place in 1972. "I’ll never follow like that again," says one veteran in the film who describes the gathering as part of the healing process.

A leaderless community created a challenge for Kalafer, who didn’t have a point person he could talk to about filming. While there are no rules against it, the group is generally against media coverage, says Kalafer. He had to earn people’s trust over time.

"The tradition of not having cameras at the gathering partially got eroded by the new role that cameras play in our culture," Kalafer says. "Everyone has a camera, everyone has a cell phone with a camera on it, everyone’s on MySpace and Facebook, and you need pictures of the cool stuff you do."

In the end, "We Love You" gets inside an event that draws crowds of 10,000 to 20,000, but doesn’t have the name recognition of other summer blowouts such as Burning Man, the annual counterculture arts festival in the Nevada desert.

But law enforcement officers are well aware of the gatherings’ existence. A confrontation last year with a group of U.S. Forest Service officers led to a dramatic third act for the film: Officers fired pepper-spray projectiles in an area the Rainbows had designated a kid-friendly zone, and Kalafer and his crew recorded the chaos. The officers, who were arresting a man on drug charges, have said Rainbows threw sticks and rocks at them.

"We Love You" screens at the film festival on Sunday at 7 p.m. at Scott Hall, 43 College Ave., New Brunswick, with two other films: the short "Postcard to Owen Sound" and the 80-minute "A Chemical Reaction." All share "turf wars" as a common theme. The program will repeat Oct. 9.

"It really harkens back to Eden," says festival curator Al Nigrin, who taught Kalafer at Rutgers and started the film series that would become the festival in 1981. "I think that’s the ultimate goal of the Rainbow Gathering: going back."

A day after the clash with law enforcement, the Rainbows prayed for peace, as they always do.

"Every time I watch the movie I get an adrenaline rush, kind of a sick feeling in my stomach," Kalafer says. "I’m glad we were able to tell that part of the story, too. It makes the Rainbows even more successful."